The blog for the cult Manhattan cable-access TV show that offers viewers the best in "everything from high art to low trash... and back again!" Find links to rare footage, original reviews, and reflections on pop culture and arthouse cinema.

Sunday, September 22, 2013

As I try to prep two longer “profile”
pieces I thought I should harken back to the earlier days of this
blog with two lovely discoveries on YT. One West Coast blog, with a
dozen writers on staff and advertisers to boot, has recently taken to
doing what I and other solo (unpaid) bloggers have been doin' on a
regular basis for years (namely touting interesting, odd, and
“alternative” clips that have come to our attention). That blog
has short entries and just highlights one clip or link at a time –
I find it impossible to just leave the reader with one meager little
offering, thus this double helping....

The theme, as the title indicates, is
kitsch en el estilo Espanol. I start out with a
female singing/dancing duo who were gigantic across Europe in the
late Seventies but were barely (never?) heard of over here. The
ladies were Mayte Mateos and María
Mendiola, and their name as
a duo was “Baccara.”
They were dancers who began as flamenco/disco specialists (that's
already two talents) and were converted into a successful musical act
by a German record mogul and a Dutch producer-composer.

Baccara sold millions of records all
across Europe, and Russia, and Japan, and the U.K. (similar to the
kitsch-overload that was Boney M), starting with their wonderfully –
and respectfully! – titled debut single, “Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”:

That song became a
“summer song” all across Europe in '77, so of course there needed
to be a follow-up. In this case the English lyrics are even riper
(“They don't make men like you in our city!”). Again, a comma in
the direct address:

And because there
is no better way to prove your “international” cred than by
singing a song about the Old West, I present Baccara's Western saga
“The Devil Sent You to Laredo.” The songwriter rhymes “Laredo”
with “desperado” (des-peray-do) – what more can you ask for?

A few other
Baccara tunes deserve honorable mention, particularly their covers of
“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” and “Light My Fire” with a new opening
(that includes the line “oh lover baby, why don't you reach out for
love?”). Baccara in fact participated in the Eurovision Song
Contest (after having had hit singles and somehow representing
Luxembourg – don't ask).

Online biographies of the Baccara
ladies emphasize the fact that they had an acrimonious break and have
since formed singing duos with other women, both laying claim to
being the “real” Baccara. In the meantime let's remember the
ladies as they were, an elegant pair of Spanish dancers who happened
to score major success singing odd songs in English. Like their
tribute to men of the sea, “Ay, Ay Sailor”:

*****

Staying
in the Spanish groove, I shift the spotlight from music to television
with an extremely unique clip from the Spanish TV game show Un,
dos, tres... responda otra vez. Politically
correct it ain't.

First,
some details about the show: Un, dos, tres... was
on for 10 seasons broadcast over a 32-year span (1972
to 2004). I won't even try
to elaborate its three-part construction, but it seems that the
single best feature of the show (at least in its initial incarnation)
is that there were a group of people cheering for the contestants to
win (the host and his “secretaries,” cute babes wearing glasses)
and another group haranguing them to lose (this should be tried on
American shows).

The clip below comes from the ninth
season, which aired from 1993 to 1994. In that season two new twists
were introduced to this already complicated show (in which
contestants answered questions, did physical stunts, and then had an
“auction,” consisting of “luck and psychological games” –
!). The first change was in the rules – contestants now had to
“buy” their way into later rounds.

The second alteration was that Paloma
Hurtado, one of the well-loved women in the show's cast, to cite
Wikipedia, “could not join the cast on the first months because she
had been accidentally shot in the face weeks before the launch of the
season and was recovering from the surgery.” Happily, Paloma
returned to the show only a few months later.

But onto the clip. Here the show's
theme is “The old Mississippi,” and actress Luisa Martin leads
the contestants in a fun game that involves a bunch of white women
“blacking” themselves up (UPDATE: a previous episode from 1982 contained a single "blacked-up" actor). I don't think this particular game will
ever be played on American television:

I
thank fellow kitsch aficionado (and
game show expert) Rich
Brown for leading the way to this
strange gem.

Friday, September 13, 2013

Of all the master directors in Hollywood’s “golden age,”
Howard Hawks remains the most enigmatic. Welles, Hitchcock, Ford, Lang, Von
Sternberg — all had readily discernible visual styles, while Hawks avoided
every kind of visual flourish and concentrated instead on pure storytelling. He
also not only made films in just about every great Hollywood genre, he made seminalfilms in those genres,
a feat that was beyond the mega-talents mentioned above.

A comprehensive festival of Hawks’ work (39 in all, spanning 44 years) — the first such in a long time in the New York area — is going on
now at the Museum of the Moving Image in my old nabe of Astoria, Queens. In the
past two weeks I’ve watched 10 of Hawks’ films (both at the museum and on disc
in preparation for a segment on the festival for the Funhouse TV show), and
Hawks’ mastery of genre remains breathtaking. The key bonus and blessing of
this festival is that the features are all being shown ON FILM, which is getting
increasingly rarer and rarer in this digital era.

But back to the films: In some cases Hawks reproduced genre
tropes that were already around (could The Big Sleep have
existed without The Maltese Falcon?) and in others he was
devising the tropes himself — as with the screwball comedy, which he
jumpstarted with Twentieth Century and perfected with
Bringing Up Baby. But in all the films that weren’t mere “assignments”
from studios (and there were few of those after the mid-Thirties) Hawks stuck
true to his “codes.”

The Cahiers du Cinema critics in France
(who of course later became the standard-bearers of the nouvelle
vague) and Andrew Sarris in this country were the first to notice
what Hawks’ seemingly dissimilar films had in common. The first tenet they
deemed “the code of professionalism” — the fact that the heroes of his pictures
took their professions very seriously, and that the mark of a person’s worth
was how well they did their job.

This extended from Walter Huston risking his life as a
steadfastly honest prison warden (The Criminal Code, 1930)
to the trio of cowboys guarding a prisoner whose confederates want to bust him
out of jail (Rio Bravo, 1959). One of the single best
examples is the sublime Only Angels Have Wings (1939), in
which Cary Grant plays a flyer in South America who is willing to lay his life (and
those of his colleagues) on the line for what seem like ridiculously routine
assignments.

The second tenet of a lot of Hawks’ dramas is that they
concern a ragtag group of individuals who band together to accomplish something
in a short span of time. This occurs frequently in his male-bonding films,
which are miles away from today’s perception of machismo in the movies.

Sure, his
characters were sometimes soldiers, had fistfights, raced cars, flew planes in
dangerous weather, and indulged in lethal gun battles, but it’s the solemn,
quiet nature of Hawks’ macho cinema that makes it so
appealing. Especially when you compare it to present-day testosterone-charged,
explosion-riddled Hollywood action pics. (The photo to the right shows Hawks showing Kirk Douglas how to throw a punch on the set of The Big Sky.)

And then there were the “Hawksian women.” Although he
himself was a very old-fashioned gent (see the documentary below), he made
numerous films featuring active, independent, wise-cracking women. His female
characters frequently make the first pass at the men and are also career-minded
— the perfect example being Rosalind Russell’s Hildy Johnson in His
Girl Friday (1940).

The men in Hawks’ screwball comedies are not the noble
figures from his male-bonding pictures. They are generally dignified gents who
have their dignity slowly stripped from them as they play the comic foil to the
female leads. Cary Grant became the personification of that character, but Gary
Cooper and Rock Hudson (in the underrated Man’s Favorite Sport?)
did wonderful jobs playing essentially the same part.

Hawks’ visual style is indeed “invisible,” except for the
feverishly wild compositions in Scarface (1932), his gorgeously-lit images of some of his female stars (most notably Bacall in To Have and Have Not), and "artsy" camera movements of his silent feature Paid to Love (1927). Sarris
noted that he crafted “good, clean, direct, functional cinema, perhaps the most distinctively American cinema of all.” Hawks favored medium shots of
his characters — to further Sarris' point, the composition is called the plan américain
by the French.

The modernity of his characters certainly makes his films
age well, but what about the lengths of his films? Both Hawks’ action pictures
and his comedies are much longer than those by his contemporaries (for example,
Rio Bravo is 141 minutes, and the very light-hearted Man’s
Favorite Sport? (1964) is a full 120 mins).

There are two elements that make his films so breezy despite
their somewhat daunting running times. The first, of course, is the casts — he
flitted from actress to actress (although he did use Marilyn twice, both
brilliantly), but he made five films with both Cary Grant and John Wayne (that
fact alone says a lot about his disparate output), and worked more than once
with Cooper, Cagney, Robinson, and Bogart. He also used memorable supporting
actors, the uncommonly mom-like (or wife-like, if you please — see Mark
Rappaport’s 1997 video-essay The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender)
Walter Brennan being a favorite.

But the central reason Hawks’ films are so compulsively
watchable despite their length is the roster of first-rank screenwriters he
used. In addition to the great Ben Hecht, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett
(whom he worked with a lot), he filmed scripts by Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond,
Charles MacArthur, Dudley Nichols, Charles Lederer, W.R. Burnett, and John
Huston. He also had the distinction of being the only director who had a
sterling relationship with William Faulkner — he filmed several Faulkner
scripts, including the seemingly unlikely Land of the Pharaohs
(1955). One of the singular joys of seeing a bunch of Hawks films in a row is hearing the same lines of dialogue (and, in some cases, seeing entire physical bits of business) crop up in different films.

To conclude this overview, there is no substitute for clips.
I urge those in the NYC area to check out the festival at the Museum of the Moving Image. MoMI had one of the best retrospectives of the last decade with
its comprehensive Jacques Rivette fest (which I count as one of the most
enlightening and important repertory festivals I’ve been to in my life). Most
of the films in the Hawks-fest are not as rarely shown as those in the Rivette
retro were, but the experience of seeing a number of them in a row, in pristine
film prints projected on a screen in an auditorium, is one that can’t be beat.

*****

There are a few documentaries about Hawks available online
(here is one in Spanish; here is one in French), but the best filmed interview
with him took place in the 1970s when Richard Schickel was assembling the
Men Who Made the Movies series. The episode about Hawks
finds him open and honest about his opinions (and decidedly unimpressed by the Westerns
of that era):

His first silent is lost, but the second one has survived
and is quite charming. It starts out in the stone age and jumps to the
present-day (and then back to the stone age!), telling the tale of a wife who
has “nothing to wear.” There’s a lot of late Twenties fashion on display, and
some pre-screwball sitcom-like comedy, in Fig Leaves (1926):

A scene from The Criminal Code (1930) that
might seem laughable today — I would be willing to bet Lenny Bruce got his “yadda
yadda, warden” (later appropriated by Seinfeld) from his
scene — but which is still tense as hell. New warden Walter Huston decides to
walk among his inmates unprotected:

Hawks loved the world of racing, but he only made two films
about it. Here is a short segment from the Cagney classic The Crowd
Roars (1932):

I am not a war movie fan and have yet to catch up to Hawks’
war pics (I will, I will), but I absolutely love Hawks’ aviator pics (in real
life, Hawks had been a flyer and you can feel it in the films). The best of the
bunch, and probably the film not already deemed a classic that I would *heavily*
recommend in the MoMI festival, is Only Angels Have Wings
(1939). Director Allan Arkush (Rock ‘n’ Roll High School)
apparently feels the same way:

Hawks’ Scarface (1932) has been eclipsed
by De Palma’s over-the-top ridiculous remake (one thing I will admit: both Paul
Muni and Pacino give terrible performances). Here is a clip of directors Walter
Hill and Michael Mann talking about the original:

The Big Sleep (1946) is one of the great
detective films of all time. It’s not a comprehensible mystery (the pre-release
1944 version of the film makes more sense — but who really needs a noir-era
mystery to make sense?). Here’s the great scene in which Bogart charms a book
store clerk, played by a young Dorothy Malone (“you begin to interest me…”):

To show that Hawks truly did work in just about every classic
Hollywood genre, here are scenes from a film he produced and supposedly
co-directed, Christian Nyby’s The Thing From Another World
(1951). It’s a classic Fifties paranoid sci-fi picture that concentrates on
plot and characterization — the monster (played by James Arness) doesn’t appear
until the very end of the film:

And speaking of classic H’wood genres, here’s the trailer
for his big, brassy, Technicolor Fifties musical Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes (1952). There are many feminist studies of the film (it is
Hawks’ one and only female bonding pic):

He made only five Westerns, but those qualify him in the
first rank of Hollywood Western directors. His first was Red River
(1948), a fascinating inter-generational saga that pits the old Hollywood (John
Wayne) vs. the new (Montgomery Clift). The very notion of using the subtle, “sensitive”
Clift in a Western is a radical one, and he is excellent facing off against “the
Duke.” Here he discusses guns with John Ireland (hey, no one ever said these films
weren’t highly Freudian):

One of the best-ever Hollywood major studio Westerns is Rio
Bravo (1959). It doesn’t have the psychological complexity and
gorgeous location-shoot visuals of the films of Budd Boetticher and Anthony
Mann, but is a hands-down masterpiece as both a Western and a male-bonding
picture:

Hawks’ movies will continue to be watched by generations to
come, but it is perhaps his screwball comedies that are best loved by old movie
fans of the current era. There are no good clips online from his first great
screwball opus, Twentieth Century (1934), so we jump
straight to the masterwork. Could there have been I Love
Lucy or any of the sillier, broader TV comedies of the Fifties and
Sixties without the superb Bringing up Baby (1938)? Here’s a
short scene (sans Katie Hepburn) that shows again what a modern director Hawks
really was:

His Girl Friday (1940) is another Hawks
comedy that was a wellspring of a lot of modern situation comedy. This remake
of The Front Page proceeds at a frantic pace and is one of the
greatest “battle of the sexes” comedies. It fell into public domain some years
ago, so copies of it can be found everywhere (it is available in its entirety
online, but is, again, best seen on a movie screen).

Here is a sequence that clearly inspired the overlapping dialogue found in the work of Funhouse favorite Robert Altman (when asked about
his use of many characters speaking at once, Altman would point to screwball comedies
as having done it years before he did).

Ball of Fire (1941) is Hawks directing a script
co-written by the inimitable Billy Wilder. Here is a little segment in which
the professors are exposed to modern slang:

I Was a Male War Bride (1949) is a
miraculously odd creation – a film that is half “sexual tension”
battle-of-the-sexes, and half gender-bending comedy in which Cary Grant is the “wife”
of his U.S. WAC wife (the fact that he’s supposed to be a Frenchman makes no
sense whatsoever, but hey…). Here’s the scene at the midpoint of the film where
the plot switches gears:

Hawks’ last movie with Grant was the high-energy farce
Monkey Business (1952). Here’s the trailer:

The final Hawks screwball comedy is Man’s Favorite
Sport? (1964). Rock Hudson stars as a fishing “expert” who has never
actually fished in his life (he’s just absorbed info from customers in the
store he works in). The film finds Hudson playing yet another character who is
hiding something — we return to Mark Rappaport, this time to Rock
Hudson’s Home Movies.

The film was not a major success, but has acquired a cult in
the half century since it came out. It clearly was “out of time,” appearing
only a few month before A Hard Day’s Night changed the tone
of screen comedy, but it holds up surprisingly well, thanks to its clever
scripting and solid lead performances (it’s got to be Paula Prentiss’ finest
moment in film). Here’s the trailer:

And it’s always best to close off with a song. One of the
most unlikely scenes in Rio Bravo — but one which comes off
perfectly — is the odd moment where Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson duet on “My
Rifle, My Pony and Me.” Walter Brennan then joins them (!) for “Cindy,” a song I
mentioned in my Dolores Fuller obit, as she re-wrote it for Elvis. Dean, Ricky,
and Walter are doing the traditional North Carolina folk tune version,
discovered by John Lomax: